Pakistan Peoples Party parliamentary leader Sadiq Umrani has said the security situation in Balochistan has deteriorated to the point where ministers are unable to travel to their own areas by road, warning that the government’s law-and-order measures have failed to produce visible results.
Speaking during a session of the Balochistan Assembly, Umrani said ministers were being forced to take indirect routes through other provinces to reach their constituencies.
“We first go to Karachi, then reach our areas via Sukkur,” he told the assembly.
Umrani said he had raised the matter with his party, the chief minister and the interior minister, but no effective action was visible on the ground.
Expressing anger over the situation, he said that if the government could not provide protection to its own minister, “then there is no need to sit in this house”.
The PPP parliamentary leader threatened to boycott the assembly, saying the state and administration were spending billions of rupees in the name of maintaining law and order, yet the situation continued to deteriorate.
Former Balochistan chief minister and National Party leader Dr Abdul Malik Baloch also expressed concern over the situation, saying all highways in Balochistan were currently closed and that the vice chancellor and pro-vice chancellor of the University of Gwadar had been abducted.
“Here, everyone is trying to prove themselves the most loyal, but no attention is being paid to the real issues,” Dr Malik said.
He said Balochistan’s problems needed to be resolved politically and that a change in the state narrative had become inevitable.
“We have repeatedly said that the solution to the problems is not bullets but dialogue,” he said, adding that bullets had been fired in Balochistan for the past 20 years and that a favourable environment should now be created for negotiations.
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